Redesigning the Front Yard: Replacing Lawns with Food, and Now Prairies

Now, it's also becoming more common to replace lawns with native plants. In the Midwest, homeowners are starting to bring back the prairie yard by yard. Prairies once covered 600,000 square miles of land in the United States, and have been reduced to just 1 percent of their former range, writes Yale Environment 360. Government agencies and conservation groups have worked on several restoration projects, but now more and more private citizens are deciding to help by abandoning their own lawns. From the article:

Lawn may long be king, but it is surrendering some ground as people increasingly welcome the helter-skelter beauty of prairie around homes and buildings, says [President of Prairie Nursery Neil] Diboll, who remembers locals referring to his nursery as the “weed farm” in the 1980s. “It’s like any social change event,” he says. “It’s a change in attitudes and styles, and those things take time.”